Famous Author Stumbles on Urban Myth
Tuesday June 3, 2008
Word has it that prize-winning author Ian McEwan (Atonement, The Cement Garden) was "embarrassed" during a public reading of an unfinished manuscript the other day when an audience member recognized a portion of it as something they had read before. McEwan explained that the passage was based on an overheard conversation, and he had no idea it had previously appeared in print.
According to a report in The Australian, the passage began with McEwan's main character, a scientist, "eating a packet of crisps on a train and being shocked when a muscular young man starts eating from the same packet and staring straight at him." Taken aback, the protagonist eventually works up the courage to confront the young man -- for no good reason, as it turns out. "It is only after leaving the train that the scientist realises his crisps are in his pocket, meaning he had in fact been eating from the other man's packet."
Said anecdote has indeed appeared in print before -- not once, but many times. Probably its most famous occurrence was in Douglas Adams' So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, published in 1984. Adams' protagonist, Arthur Dent, recounts the story in a fashion very similar to the above, the only significant difference being that the "purloined" snack food consists of biscuits (cookies), not crisps. Adams himself is said to have claimed that the passage was based on an incident that really happened to him, though it was known to have circulated as an urban legend well before before the book came out.
"The Packet of Biscuits" also appeared in Jan Harold Brunvand's 1984 collection The Choking Doberman: And Other "New" Urban Legends, wherein the good professor cited variants found in British media sources as far back as 1972.
Read more about it:
• The Packet of Biscuits - Urban Legends
• Packet of Chips Lands Ian McEwan in Strife - The Australian
• Writer's Crisp Plot Is Already Bagged - Daily Mail
According to a report in The Australian, the passage began with McEwan's main character, a scientist, "eating a packet of crisps on a train and being shocked when a muscular young man starts eating from the same packet and staring straight at him." Taken aback, the protagonist eventually works up the courage to confront the young man -- for no good reason, as it turns out. "It is only after leaving the train that the scientist realises his crisps are in his pocket, meaning he had in fact been eating from the other man's packet."
Said anecdote has indeed appeared in print before -- not once, but many times. Probably its most famous occurrence was in Douglas Adams' So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, published in 1984. Adams' protagonist, Arthur Dent, recounts the story in a fashion very similar to the above, the only significant difference being that the "purloined" snack food consists of biscuits (cookies), not crisps. Adams himself is said to have claimed that the passage was based on an incident that really happened to him, though it was known to have circulated as an urban legend well before before the book came out.
"The Packet of Biscuits" also appeared in Jan Harold Brunvand's 1984 collection The Choking Doberman: And Other "New" Urban Legends, wherein the good professor cited variants found in British media sources as far back as 1972.
Read more about it:
• The Packet of Biscuits - Urban Legends
• Packet of Chips Lands Ian McEwan in Strife - The Australian
• Writer's Crisp Plot Is Already Bagged - Daily Mail
Comments
There is a 10 minute short on uTube called “The Cookie Theif” which is exactly this legend, very cute with no dialogue.